
.6" 



.J 



pH8^ 



E 440 
.5 

.P98 
Copy 1 



SERMOisr 



PREACHED ON THE 






JANUARY 4, 1861, 



SET APART BI THE 



PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 



ST. JOHN'S CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C, 



SMITH P Y N E , 



PASTOE ST.* JOHN'S PARISH. 



WASHINGTON : 

im'oILL H, WiTIIEROW, PRINTEltS, 

I ■' 1861. 



r 



ipei 



\ 



S ERMON^ 



PREAC3ED ON THE 



|^i| d i^i&ns, "^mnlMim, md f rE|ir, 



JANUARY 4, 1861, 



SET APART BT THE 



PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 



ST. JOHN'S CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C, 



SMITH P Y N E , 

PASTOR ST. JOHN'S PARISH. 



WASHINGTON : 

m'QILL & WITHEROW, PRINTERS. 
1861. 






.5 



<3- 

to 

> SERMON 



"Go AND SIN NO MORE." St. JoHN, 8: 11. 

Called together so solemnly as we have been, for confession of and 
humiliation for national and individual transgression, I am not dis- 
posed to run through the common-place catalogue of human transgression; 
for there is a very subtle temptation in the generalities of such a con- 
fession and humiliation. There is such a thing as a comfortable kind 
of penitence, which comes with the multitude to acknowledge, as it 
goes with the multitude to do, evil. 

What has brought us to this pass it needs no profound discernment 
to see. Fullness of bread — such a tide of prosperity as the world never 
witnessed before ; such a liberty, or rather license, of thought, word, and 
act, as no word or authority of God or man had ever contemplated or 
sanctioned — those things, acting on uuregenerate and uurestrained 
nature, have just been doing their natural work, and are now producing 
their natural fruit. And it is such provident wisdom as sends the 
husbandman to prune from his trees their over luxuriance, to gather 
his grain before it falls from over ripeness ; it is such great provi- 
dential mercy that is now arresting us in full career. 

Not for the first time by many — yes, many times within the memory 
of every man who has seen twenty years of active life — has God mani- 
festly put forth His hand to stay a people plunging headlong into sin. 
And with what result ? 

Three years ago, how ready the nation was to don its robe of deco- 
rous sackcloth ; and yet, has this nation ever known three years of 
such unbridled luxury, such daring social corruption public and pri- 
vate, such gigantic frauds ? 

Had I not a right then to speak of and to warn you against that 
comfortable penitence which deals in generalities ; which is penitent in 



I)riut ami iu sauctuary, and then frames for itself a kind of perverted 
absolution, which says, " Go and sin" more and morel 

I hope that the stern providential wakening we have now received 
will prevent this from being a repetition of those farces before high 
Heaven ; that each man among ns, from the highest to the lowest in 
the land, in obeying this call of the Chief Magistrate, in adverting to 
the evils of the time, will feel that he is offering an affront to God, if 
he does not probe his own conscience ; if he does not ask himself, as in 
the conscious presence of the Searcher of Hearts, what share, active or 
passive, he has had in helping them on, in swelling that great army 
of public and private vices which have already sealed the destinies of 
many immortal creatures, are at this moment jeoparding the chances 
for the life eternal of myriads, and may present that critical point 
whereon turns the salvation of his own soul. 

And here, also, let me say, there is room for error quite as subtle 
and dangerous as in those generalities to which I adverted. 

In any specification of the evils of the day which might be presented 
to a man's mind, or which he might make out for himself, there is 
such a thing as being very indignantly penitent for otlier people's 
sins, or what we choose to consider such. There may be a kind of 
geographical conscience, in which the thermometer of condemnation 
or contrition rises or falls with what may be called the latitude of the 
sin. I fear very much that even within these walls, if I were to throw 
my deprecation of the evils which have brought us to-day to our knees 
into the form of a litany, if the response of the heart could find utter- 
ance, there would be no common utterance at all ; but, alternately, 
there would come, now from one class and now from another, a very 
earnest cry, not " Good Lord deliver u.s," but " Good Lord deliver 
them," yes, them, " the wretched creatures affected with judicial blind- 
ness, who will take their wrong waj-, and will not let us have our right 
one ) who are dragging us down in their own descent, and making us 
common sharers with themselves in the consequences of their wicked- 
ness ; us, the innocent victims ; and yet, you see, we pray for them," 
and so there comes in again the comfortable penitence. 

My brethren, you know this ought not so to be, and yet you know 
to what an extent it is. You know, that if I were to present, in faithful 
detail, the crying evils of the time, characterizing them just in their 
true proportions, and were thus to express the feeling of contemptuous 
indignation and humiliation for ray country and myself, with which I 
loiik uj)on them «//, that I should only make some of you very angry ; 



impart to some of you feelings of most unchristian satisfaction ; the same 
minds probably vibrating now with one emotion, now with the other. 
I shall minister to no such end. 

I believe we are suffering under evils, in the production of which we 
have all had a share. If God be punishing us for our sins, let him 
that is without sin make the first arraignment of the Divine Providence. 
I think, however, that we may very legitimately, and, I hope, use- 
fully, consider some of the causes, which, if they have not produced, 
at least tend to render the evils of the time more portentous, to aggra- 
vate and inflame them. 

1. Foremost among these cnuses I place the false religionism of the 
day. I am not contemplating religion in any doctrinal or denominational 
aspect. I have nothing now to do with dogmas, false as I am sure 
many of them are. What I advert to is the false theory of religion, 
the wrong idea of what religion is, in this respect at least, that it teaches 
and enforces all the obligations of this life as an integral part of the 
system of eternal truth, whereby every man's soul is to be saved. 

I have said so much to you on this theme at other times that I will 
not enlarge upon it now. What I want you to consider is, whether 
you are suffering any distinction to exist in the rule or principle by 
which you are governed in your spiritual and that which controls your 
temporal relations? Are you a different creature in the Church and 
out of it ''. In the one case, have you one absolute law, the Word ; one 
reliance, the sanctifying Spirit of God ? In the other, do you obey 
impulse, inclination, interest, without any immediate 6r conscious 
reference to the higher, the only real law? 

When made conscious of this, we come a*; once to the source of the 
whole irregularity and inconsistency of our own lives and those of 
other men. When we examine ourselves on such a point we find that, 
perhaps all unconsciously, we had resolved religion with something 
absolutely between the soul and God — beginning there, qndiug there; 
and that our relation to the world had a law of its own. If we look 
into our lives, we see what strange things we think, and say, and do, 
and we see why; and we can understand sympathetically why it is 
that other men think and say and do such strange things. 

jMy brethren, a state like this is a very perilous one. It is one 
which unhinges the whole frame-work of society, as God would "have 
it organized in a Christian world. It is one of the great causes of the 
evils which are upon us now. And I press it upon you as the subject 
for each man's examination of himself, because one deception to which 



we are liable is a eonvenicnt false humility, by wliicii each man reasms 
of how little consequence his individual action can be in its beariu" 
on the whole. The ocean is made up of drops of water ; if thfi majority 
of those drops had the power to throw olf their saltaess, the air we 
breathe would become tainted ; if every drop had that power, the 
whole would putrify, and make the earth one Golgotha. 

2. Closely allied with this false religionism, which is causing the 
evils of the time to be the evils they are, is the false educationism, 
(if there be such a word,) by which I mean that false theory and 
false idea of education which hai trained and given to us the men of 
the time. 

And here, as I said under a former head, that by reli,f!jion I did not 
mean dogma, so now I say, that by education I do not mean learning, 
book-learning, scholarship. I mean by education that by which a man 
is " trained up for the way in which he should go ;" for the business, 
the duties, the obligations, and relations of life. 

In these respects I fear that the American people is the most 
ill-elucated on the face of the civilized earth; that there ara more 
ill-regulated, and, therefore, ill-educated, minds amoog us than in any 
nation pretending to any degree of intelligence and refinement. It is 
true some of the manifestations of this may be ascribed to the fact 
that other lands have vomited forth on our shores hosts of men who 
in their own laud, might have been kept in due and useful subordina- 
tion ; but who, rising here to a personal and social position, for which 
no previous training had qualified them, become actively and danger- 
ously mischievous. But still, our own people, gifted with such great nat- 
ural intelligence, how ill-educated they are I How unqualified to under- 
stand the great obligations of life, to reason calmly rosjjccting them; 
to meet with manly intelligence, with moral energy and unswervin*'- 
principle, its varied and tempting emergencies! And all this, sprintr- 
ing from the one false idea, that the whole difference between a t^ood 
cdiicaticn and a bad education is, that iu the one case the man learns 
more thini/H, in tin- other fewer thlnija. Education is taken as a 
syniiuimu fur what is taught in a .school ; religious education for 
what is taught in a Sunday school. 

I have no d(tubt that there an- thousands an i tens of thousands 
aniortg the households of the land where a higher and trufr standard 
is reco-rnizcd. Hut, brought as we are to-day to deal with national 
evils, wi- must look on this, a.s on all, on the same great scale, as masses 
deal with ..r ;irc :iflc( ted by tlicm. 



Home education, home discipline ! — these are the wants of the time. 
On an occasion lilce this, I can do no more than indicate the want : it 
would take more than one sermon to define the mode in which the 
necessity is to be supplied. But I believe the land is at this moment 
in the hand of a better Teacher; that there is a discipline which will 
be a severe yet most merciful schoolmaster, which will, under God, 
lead many hearts to Christ, and will teach them how to lead their 
children's hearts there too. Once awake to the need, (lod will teach, 
by the greatest instinct He has planted in our hearts, how to meet it. 

And yet, let me endeavor to give one familiar illustration of my 
idea what good education is, not on the great scale, but ou what the 
world calls the small. 

I wish, be it supposed, to educate my son to be a blacksmith. I 
choose, of course, some one competent to teach him his trade ; but I 
am not going to be taken in by the man who shows a great deal of 
iron fancy work at his door, and tells me that he will teach my son to 
do all that, and in a shorter time than any other man can. I take the 
hard-working man, who has worked his way to the full understanding 
of his business, and shows me that he understands it. I take the 
honest, decent, principled workman, upon whom the only soil is that 
of honest industry; the only taint which he will communicate to my 
child, one pleasant to look upon in its place, and easily washed off, 
leaving fair skin and mind beneath it. 

But, to prepare my son to learn with any profit what that man can 
teach him, teaching must have gone before. He must leave my house 
with habits of order, habits of obedience, the great habit above all of 
doing his work, all work, in the love and fear of God. When he 
comes to his home, after his daily toil, with all its grime upon him, 
with its din still ringing in his ears, with the fresh memory, perchance, 
of some word of impurity or blasphemy or passion ; if he find that 
home one of order, cleanliness, of cheerful content, the very contrast 
of the outer life will make him prize the inner life only the more 
dearly. I will not habitually absent myself from that home, lest he 
should come to think that to be one sign and privilege of being a man. 
No ; I will be there, and strive to be so there, that he will miss me 
when I am not — miss the best and truest friend he has in the world, 
who can sympathize with his pleasures, counsel him in his dilficulties, 
feel for his trials. When we have talked together, read together, 
amid that little world of home, we will pray together, and then go to 
our repose. 



8 

Variations, of course, there will aud must be in that and every life — 
amusement, pociety ; but I have no fear that my boy will find friends 
or society which can take the place of home. He will come back to 
it, with the sentiment of the good old song in his heart, " There is no 
place like home." 

Now, that is what I would call a good education, and I should look 
upon my son, when he had served his time and was ready to set up for 
himself, as a well-educated man. 

My brethren, there is another picture, I fear no uncommon one : — 
a boy who goes to his trade just because he must do something to 
make a living, and his parents cannot afford to keep him idle. Work 
is a necessity, and nothing else. He leaves a home where he has been 
alternately caressed or punished just as father and mother were in 
good or bad hunior. If he has any religious training, it has been ob- 
tained at a Sunday school, where he was sent partly to get him out of 
the way on that difficult day, Sunday, or partly to relieve the sense 
of responsibility which clings to the parental heart. There has been 
nothing to bring that teaching home in any sense; nothing which told 
him to carry it to his anvil, because he saw it blessing and guiding and 
restraining the business of the household life. If he has any education, 
(in the common sense of the term,) it has been acquired at some school 
to which he has been sent because the greatest quantity of leai'niug is 
promised in the shortest time ; and the money paid is looked upon as 
wa.sted, unless the labor of learning is going on visibly all the time ; 
unless there is a good long task to be learned at night, which works a 
presumed double benefit, so much more learning and a troublesome 
member of a family dispcscd of, put out of the way. Is not that a 
pleasant association with the home circle ? 

From this home he goes to his trade, and finds hard work, and pos- 
sibly hard words, and evil companions, and evil example. He goes 
back to the home at night. He is in it, not of it. Father is out at 
some political gathering or tavern haunt, mother at some nightly church 
or nightly junketing, it matters little which, so far as home influence 
is concerned. Oh dreary, dreary place ! The corner of the street is far 
bi'tfer, where there is at least comjtany and amusing talk, no matter 
about what. The eye and the ear become accustomed to things which 
I will not particularize. The iniinl becomes intelligent for all that 
•street knowledge, the heart tilled with just the things which are there 
poured into it. I g(» no furtlierl 

The trade, meaiiwhile. goes on, aud he may work intelligently and 



industriously at it, but how is he educated for it ? What is there to 
prevent his turning that business knowledge and intelligence to any 
purpose by which he may gain a living; to the picking a lock as well 
as making one ; to ihe muking a bar pry open a door or chest, as well 
as secure them ? Nothing but the fear of man, the fear of law, the 
fear of being found out, or perchance some lingering spark of that 
light of the Eternal Word, which " lighteth every man that cometh 
into the world." 

I have gone down in the social scale to find my illustration that I 
might make it more comprehensive. To your consciences I leave it, 
my brethren, how far, with change of mere name and circumstance, 
that comprehension embraces yourselves; but whether or no it touches 
yoxi, I know that there are multitudes in this land whom it does: mul- 
titudes of homes like this and worse than this. And it is the children 
who have come forth from such homes, whether that home was a 
palace or a cottage, on plantation or prairie, in crowded city or solitary 
forest; it is the undisciplined home that has sent forth the undis- 
ciplined hearts and minds which, as intelligence or station was higher 
or lower, have been the agents or the instruments in this wild confu- 
sion. North and South, which is now disturbing our peace. The 
causes have been seen, have been denounced long ago; none so deaf 
as those who now stand aghast and unnerved by the consequences. 
From pulpit and from press have come for years back warnings to the 
political fathers of this land — " You are training up children who will 
pull your house about your ears;" but each has thought that when the 
struggle came, it would be the house on the other side of the way that 
would go, and in the meantime such use could be made of these active 
spirits that it was a pity to an-est them. They were not arrested. 
And now that there threatens one indiscriminate ruin, we call on Grod 
to help us. God is helping us by sending such warnings of the ava- 
lanche ; but He will help us no farther, unless we rouse and help our- 
selves. Help ourselves by just becoming serious and determined; by 
the tnen of the land letting the grown-up children of the land com- 
prehend by very significant action that the play is becoming too 
serious, too like the business of the world, and that the men are going 
to take that business into their own hands. 

3. And this vei-y image of children, and play, and players, suggests 
another of those causes which are making the evils of the time the 
evils they are. 

I have spoken of false theories in religion and education. Thie two 



10 

falsities have begotten a third — unreality, exaggeration, extrava- 
gance in word and conduct, vrliich have stamped the national character 
to a degree utterly at variance with what I'ornis the basis of that char- 
acter. Shrewdues.s, intelligence, calculation, a spirit of enterprlzc that 
looks to the most material and positive results, these are the domiiiniit 
features of the Aiucrican mind. But the absence of wholesome reli- 
gious influences, or rather the presence of a religion Avhich made pro- 
fession, and sincere profession too in one direction, compatible with a 
very wide indulgence in another, so that a man might be a good Chris- 
tian man in a technical acceptation, while he was a very keen business 
man or ardent politician in the loosest sense of these terms. This, 
combined with education that did not really form and regulate the 
mind at all, has given the strangest aspect to the national character, in 
those classes especially who force themselves most, and are now forcing 
themselves, very unpleasantly on our attention. Bjldn ess of assertion, 
as though it were part of a man's calculation that the best way to gain 
his end is to say o«y///('»^ that promotes it — daring projects marked 
by great intelligence, but both assertion and project unrestrained by 
truth or principle — these things, under the impulse of any stron"- 
interest or passion, have given such a tone of exaggeration to writing, 
to debate, and even to social intercourse, that the public mind and tasts 
have become diseased, and, like the morbid appetite, reject all but 
highly-seasoned food. 

I shall not follow this tendency out into its fatal inflaencc on public 
morals, the familiarity it induces with the most monstrous violations 
of truth and honor, making them not even a nine Jay's wonder. I now 
only wish to make you contemplate it as it is in reality, one of those 
things, if it 1)2 not (he thing, which is making our present position just 
what it is. This habit of talking big, *' in Ercles vein," like Antient 
Pistol, inasmuch as it must make a man conscious that he continually 
says mora than he means, begets in him a lirm conviction that others 
do so also. The consequence is, that when two parties, each tainted with 
the same propensity, are pitted one against the other, they try to out- 
talk each other. No greater evil would follow, did it rest here, than 
that evil which always follows deviation from truth, did not these 
men find themselves suddenly committ.'d by their words; for others, 
le-s f-hrcwd but more honest, have meanwhile believed all that was zaid 
boih by enemy and friend, and now resolve very wanton bluster into 
very vigorous and mischievous action. 

IJuhuppily, to indicate the evil does not provide the remedy. And 



11 

yet, if there be any truth ia an idea like this, it does inspire hope that 
before st«rn renlities all unrealities '.vill vanish ; that in the face of 
iinpenJiiig consequences, men who hare talked the world into phrenzy 
will strive at lait to talk it back ag.iiu into peace, at the very small 
sacrllice of p:irsiriten?e and consistency in wrong. 

There is no fear that whatever is true or just in either of ihe ex- 
tremes of opinion which are agitating us will not remain. The agiia- 
tion so far a blessing that it will cause the wrong to be righted and the 
right defined. 

My brethren, I have said but a small portion of what is in my mind 
to say to you to-day. Such evils as I have indicated, so far as they 
touch us, teach us by the enunciation of them what is our duty. 

Tt is at such times as thefe that eoery man should feel and realize 
how important a part he has to play. 

I read a good saying lately of some ')ne who saM that those who are 
the first to declare their readiness to shed the last drop of their blood 
were ordiaarily the last to ^hed the fir^t drop. 

I have good, earnest, I think well-grounded hope and confidence 
that there will be no drops of blood called for first or last. But the 
best guarantee against that is firmness in the right, declared willing- 
ness to redress all wroni; duly represented and rightly sought. 

For us, who have lived under the immediate asgis of this magnifi- 
cent government, it is ordinarily but a small and humble return that 
we can make, and I trust in God t'lat we may go on sharing with 
others its protection while we willingly abandon to them its honors. 
But if any return beyonJ willing obedience and quiet service should 
ever be req aire 1, then I tell you, stmding here before this altar of 
peace aad luve, but the altar too of du'y and obligation, GIVE IT ! 



J 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



011 895 727 i • 



'• \ 



